They already have a cloud storage system, it's just nothing like Dropbox... Given Apple's intent to keep things simple and to hide the file system from users, I highly doubt that something like what you're asking for will ever happen...

This isn't to say I wouldn't want it, in fact I'd love something like that, it's just not a realistic expectation in my opinion.

They already have a cloud storage system, it's just nothing like Dropbox... Given Apple's intent to keep things simple and to hide the file system from users, I highly doubt that something like what you're asking for will ever happen...

This isn't to say I wouldn't want it, in fact I'd love something like that, it's just not a realistic expectation in my opinion.

Pietro

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While I half-agree, the amount of professional Apple pundits that have mentioned the lack of a dropbox-like functionality is growing all the time. I have listened/watched/read so many shows & articles in the last few months from pundits saying how Apple's iCloud service is much too simplistic so ends-up being MORE confusing and complicated to use, especially for non-techie users, thus defeating its usefulness, when the other mainstream providers (eg. GDrive, Dropbox, SkyDrive [renamed OneDrive in a month!], etc.) are offering a much more simple docs folder users would appreciate a lot more.

...they can't all be wrong, and I agree with them.

Hiding the file system is silly, as almost all users folder-ize their files on their Macs, so they can group by topic/project/company or whatever (eg. "Banking" folder, subfolders for "Bank 1", "Bank 2", et al). Those folders usually contain a mixture of file types too, so when one needs to look into one of them, we want to see and have access to ALL the files in the folder, not just .pages, .numbers, or whatever, ones that happen to sync over Apple's iCloud sync.

To be fair, I think the reason they have failed to either increase the free iCloud storage (and paid tiers above 50GB), is because Apple have not built-out their datacentres enough yet, so they are playing catch-up to the likes of MS/Google/Amazon, et al. When they appear (plus they fix the Core Data sync service for non-Apple app data syncing), then we'll finally see some improvements from them in this area. Fingers-crossed, at least, otherwise they're gonna fall behind in the online services battle, especially those that also offer better cross-platform compatibility.

Well, I would be happy if Apple would not transmit iCloud Mails unencrypted (yes, this is no joke, iCloud transmits all Mails as plain text).
Not even supporting starttls on the inbound servers, IMAP and SMTP Servers using the outdated RC-4 algorithm, no forward security and only TLS 1.0???
Come on Apple you can do better!!!

1. iTunes Match on the browser.
2. iTunes Match like service for photos. A service which will automatically sync all the albums from aperture/iphoto and keep the album structure and will make these photos available on all enabled devices so that we will not have to keep photos on storage to view and we will not have to sync our devices physically to have properly albumized photos. Besides, it should let us add photos directly from ios devices to the albums, not just to photo stream or other streams.

2. iTunes Match like service for photos. A service which will automatically sync all the albums from aperture/iphoto and keep the album structure and will make these photos available on all enabled devices so that we will not have to keep photos on storage to view and we will not have to sync our devices physically to have properly albumized photos. Besides, it should let us add photos directly from ios devices to the albums, not just to photo stream or other streams.

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While a nice idea, can you just imagine the amount of bandwidth (and time) needed for us to upload our entire Photo library (can often be above 100GBs) to Apple's cloud? Not to mention the amount of server space Apple would need to have to handle such a service?

I think Photostream is as far as Apple will take it for photos, at least for today where upload speeds are rather slow and online server space is still a "luxury good".

Perhaps 5 to 10 years we may see something like that, but who knows what technology will do by then and possibly our iPhones will be so good that we will no longer use anything else to take pictures, basically rendering this service useless.

While a nice idea, can you just imagine the amount of bandwidth (and time) needed for us to upload our entire Photo library (can often be above 100GBs) to Apple's cloud? Not to mention the amount of server space Apple would need to have to handle such a service?

I think Photostream is as far as Apple will take it for photos, at least for today where upload speeds are rather slow and online server space is still a "luxury good".

Perhaps 5 to 10 years we may see something like that, but who knows what technology will do by then and possibly our iPhones will be so good that we will no longer use anything else to take pictures, basically rendering this service useless.

Just my opinion,
Pietro

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I agree that it is quite challenging in terms of bandwidth and cloud storage but I think it is still doable. For example, itunes match offers incredible amount of cloud storage for very cheap in my opinion. The point of that service is to match the songs so that you will not use bandwidth and Apple will not use storage for your songs. However, there are a lot of songs that just don't match. I have 20 GBs of uploaded songs for instance. I am sure a lot of people has much more than that.

Maybe in the future, just as you say, we may need nothing but iphones to take satisfactory pictures. It would be still nice to have all the pictures on all the devices without doing anything though. Currently, the photos I have taken on my iphone will be uploaded to my photo stream. I have to go to my photo stream on Aperture to copy these photos to the album I want and then I have to delete those photos from my iphone and manually sync the album to the iphone to have those photos back. I just don't like to keep photos on the camera roll.

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